Remembering the alamo again

Alamo is the Spanish name for the tree that English calls cottonwood and that botanists know as Populus deltoides. This tree readily springs up near sources of water, so it’s not surprising that on September 4th I saw several cottonwood saplings near the pond between Dessau Rd. and Knowell Dr. in a new subdivision on the Blackland Prairie in northeast Austin. I don’t know what the red spot on the leaf was.

Perhaps the red spot is due to one of the veins getting nicked. How muscular the tree is, I don’t know, but at least we humans have the deltoid shape in common with it.

I wondered, and went looking. It seems the Alamo was being called the Alamo before the rows of cottonwood trees were planted there, so the legend of the the legendary site being named after the trees may not be accurate.

My intuition is that even if cottonwood trees got planted at the site after the name Alamo became established, there must have been at least one such tree there in earlier times, or else why would Spanish-speaking explorers or settlers have used that name in the first place? Unless some early document turns up that explains the name, we’ll probably never know the truth of the matter.

To reply to your first paragraph in a similar vein to the one in which you wrote it, I’ll say that I never would cotton to that cottonwood explanation, and any nicking that took place was just in the nick of time, which bled minutes and seconds rather than red fluid.

All that certainly appealed to me, too, Jane. When it came to the orientation of my subject, I could have rotated the camera to make the leaf appear vertical, but I decided to go with the greater dynamism of an off-kilter subject.